Dead Can Dance – Queen City Sounds and Art

Queen City Sounds Podcast S3E03: Bestial Mouths

Bestial Mouths, photo by Elemental Eyes Photography

Bestial Mouths began in 2009 as a band that early on might be considered post-punk but even its debut EP, 2009’s Stabile Vices, had elements of noise and industrial set to ritualistic rhythms with tribal percussion. All along, vocalist Lynette Cerezo who has a background in fashion and design brought to performances a striking visual presentation that drew upon the imagery of mythology and dreams in a creative interplay with the music. Cerezo’s lyrics have always explored issues of gender, identity and personal liberation and whether combined with the performance or not, certainly enhanced by the live experience, meant as a conduit for mutual inspiration and uplift by challenging arbitrary societal notions of “proper” social roles and behavior and aesthetics. A Bestial Mouths show and the music embodies aspects of the subconscious and what has traditionally been relegated to artistic darkness and the feminine, the intuitive and the supernatural. Cerezo through the practice of her art reclaims all of that as a source of power and dignity by demonstrating how it isn’t negative, that it is a part of a complete human life and that such things can be harnessed to the benefit of the self and all.

More recent Bestial Mouths records starting with the new arc of music since the project has been mainly headed by Cerezo since 2018 has reconciled the early post-punk and Goth sound and noise completely with the more mystical and non-Western experimental sonic ideas and rhythms that have been a feature if not the focus of the music since the beginning. But in 2020’s RESURRECTEDINBLACK, the first Bestial Mouths record crafted with Cerezo at the creative helm it’s all there for a listening experience not unlike the psycho-mystical depths of a Dead Can Dance album but darker and more harrowing and cathartic. The new album R.O.T.T. (inmyskin), with the acronym standing for Road of Thousand Tears drops on August 11, 2023 and continues the path of its predecessor but with the songs seemingly emerging from the murk that seemed entirely appropriate for a set of songs from a time of great uncertainty and treading new musical paths. Those appreciate Diamanda Galás’ elemental catharsis, psychic fearlessness and avant-garde sensibilities might find a great deal to appreciate about Bestial Mouths as will those with a taste for the political industrial punk of ADULT. and Jarboe’s deeply emotional and unfettered vocal performances but while in Swans and since.

Listen to our interview with Lynette Cerezo of Bestial Mouths on Bandcamp and catch the group perform in Colorado on Wednesday, June 21 at Vulture’s in Colorado Springs with WitchHands and eHpH and on Thursday, June 22 at Hi-Dive in Denver with Church Fire and DJ Shannon Von Kell as well as other dates announced on the band’s website (linked below) where you can find more information and links to listen and purchase music and merch.

bestialmouths.com

Alvinos Zavlis Evokes a Sense of Countless Multitudes and Depths in One’s Own Mind on “Can’t let U go”

With a title like “Can’t let U go” one might expect a different style of music going in. But composer Alvinos Zavlis brings a looped piano figure that suggests endless cycles of seemingly infinite variety. This while wind instrument drones drift in and out while a female vocalist sings in a fashion both ritualistic and classical. Lingering piano notes mark time later in the track and distorted violin adds dramatic texture alongside slow bursts of synth tones. The vocals layer and double to create a sense of experiences and memories outside of linear time and in fact the song feels like something written in compound time akin to something you might have heard from late 80s Dead Can Dance or Heilung. The net effect is majestic and transporting while meditative and tranquil. The image for the single of a figure crying out to reveal spiral staircases within spiral staircases truly evokes the impression of the song expressing the idea of countless multitudes and depth within everyone. Listen to “Can’t let U go” on Spotify and connect with Zavlis at the links below.

Alvinos Zavlis on musicglue.com

Alvinos Zavlis on Twitter

Alvinos Zavlis on Instagram

Bank Myna’s “Aurora (Vi Ska Sova)” is a Primeval Sound Ritual for the Awakening of the Ancient Mind

A tremulous drone and the sound of a chime being struck ease us into the action of Bank Myna’s song “Aurora (Vi Ska Sova).” The song pulls us further in with clipped, crunchy guitar riff and female vocals that float over the ensuing flow of distorted drones and processional percussion. Before you’re fully aware of it, you are in for that journey of the song to a deeper place in the earth and in your own mind in connection with the primordial and transcendent side of your consciousness and aspect of your identity that predates the imposition of modern civilization onto your psyche. It is an introspective yet liberating sensation that seems to have no formal beginning and no formal end. Fans of SubRosa and Dead Can Dance will find much to like here. Listen to “Aurora (Vi Ska Sova) on Spotify and connect with the Parisian band Bank Myna through the links on it’s Linktree below. Also look out for the group’s forthcoming album VOLAVERUNT due Feb 25, 2022.

Bank Myna Links

Lustmord & Karin Park Chart a Path Through the Dark Waters Ahead to a Mysterious Future With ALTER

Lustmord & Karin Park, photo by Edgar Bachel

Lustmord is perhaps best known for his extensive and varied career in crafting fascinating and evocative soundscapes and his work in and with SPK, Current 93, Jarboe, Clock DVA and Melvins. So it should come as no surprise that his collaborative album with Karin Park, vocalist and member of Swedish rock band ÅRABROT, would yield something different and a synthesis of his own creatives strengths and hers. ALTER (out now on Pelagic Records) is not simply clever wordplay suggestive of a place of spiritual practice and the act of transforming an object or identity. It would be tempting to compare this record to something you might hear from Dead Can Dance because of the emotional resonance and invoking the mystical by tapping into ancient and devotional musical ideas. But there is something deeply dark about the songs of ALTER that feel like you’re witnessing the decay and collapse of modern civilization in mythical terms, an end of the world we know and the emergence of the next as manifested in a film by John Boorman. The sound design on every song has that haze of deep mystery that hung at the edges of most of Boorman’s films with drones and processed white noise flowing in the background. Park provides the distinct emotional connection with her voice like a mournful incantation beseeching strength and wisdom from beyond time.

Lustmord has created a sense of space like a cavernous cathedral but one whose shifting sounds and textures is more like a tunnel down which Park travels on a journey in the near dark. The album would feel claustrophobic if the sounds weren’t also so expansive and suggestive of the wide open. Yet it also hints at a way of shielding oneself from a coarsened and perilous world until such a time as it might be safe to re-emerge and rebuild, to establish new myths for a better future while witnessing those that have served as the framework for the modern iteration of human culture to wither away and dissolve. Overall it’s reminiscent in a way of many of those Utopian science fiction films and works of the 1970s and 1980s like Logan’s Run, Zardoz (as hinted at earlier with the Boorman reference), J.G. Ballard’s most unusual novels and Gene Wolfe’s Urth of the New Sun series. All depict a future we never could have predicted and this album sounds like the music of the passage to that unprecedented future during a time of crises beyond the ability of our current social organizations and belief systems to weather intact. A dark, deep yet ultimately rewarding album of completely unconventional and enigmatic beauty that seeps into your consciousness and lingers long afterward. Listen to/download ALTER on Bandcamp and watch the video for “Song of Sol” on YouTube.